Cyclic redundancy checking is a useful part of many known applications such as error detection and parity bit calculations. A Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) is a type of function that receives an input data stream and produces an output value of a certain length. Cyclic redundancy checks can be used as a checksum to detect accidental alteration of data during transmission or storage. The output value computed in a CRC process is a remainder of a division over a finite field of the input data stream by a CRC polynomial.
Several conventional software methods exist that perform the division to calculate the remainder. Some conventional methods include a Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR) method and a lookup table (LUT) method. The LFSR method processes one bit at each iteration and is consequently slow. In the LUT method, several bits of the input data stream are processed in parallel at each iteration. The LUT method approach comes at the cost of large tables or usage of many tables, which result in significant memory costs.